


Two Can Keep a Secret if One of Them is Dead

by lit_chick08



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: 5+1 Things, Gen, Kink Meme
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-04
Updated: 2013-08-04
Packaged: 2017-12-22 09:31:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 774
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/911646
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lit_chick08/pseuds/lit_chick08
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>5 Times Ned wanted to tell someone about Jon Snow's mother and didn't and 1 Time he did</p>
            </blockquote>





	Two Can Keep a Secret if One of Them is Dead

1\. **Ashara Dayne**

He arrives at Starfall with Jon in one arm and Dawn in the other. Ashara welcomes him as much as any woman can welcome the man who struck down her beloved brother. She offers him and Howland rooms and baths, and when they sup, she drawls, "I can't believe _you_ have a bastard. Who is his mother?"

Ned knows she'd keep the secret. After what happened to Elia and her children, Ashara understands better than anyone the danger in being dragonspawn. But she is all but a stranger and so he says, "I'd rather not say."

Ashara shrugs, drinks her wine. She offers up Wylla for Jon.

"It's not as if I need her anymore," Ashara adds as she pours herself another cup, and whatever has happened since their last meeting has changed her as much as it has changed him. 

2\. **Catelyn Stark**

Catelyn Tully is more than he ever hoped to want in a wife. As he glimpses her standing before Winterfell with his son in her arms, Ned cannot believe someone so special can truly be his.

The moment he introduces Jon as his son, he sees her shatter. Not visibly, of course; she is a Tully and she is not one for scenes. Instead she turns her face away and when she looks at him again, there is ice in her blue eyes. 

In the months and years that follow, even after the ice towards him has melted, the desire to tell Catelyn the truth never abates. He nearly does a hundred times, the weight of it bearing down on him, but he cannot. Ned could not live with himself if he endangered Catelyn, and knowing the truth will only do that.

3\. **Maester Luwin**

The year he turns ten, Jon is constantly ill. No matter what Maester Luwin does, he cannot seem to get him well. A cold becomes a sickly crackle in his chest, the crackle becomes a bone rattling cough, blood begins to appear in the phlegm he chokes up; Ned spends his days in the godswood and his evenings sitting vigil beside him. Maester Luwin approaches him one day and asks as politely as he can if Jon's mother was a sickly woman.

Lyanna's health was perfect until the end. Ned almost tells him that, assures him that Lyanna was healthy and Rhaegar was too until Robert's warhammer pushed his heart out through his back, but he doesn't.

"She was a healthy woman," he gruffly informs the maester.

Jon recovers without Luwin knowing.

4\. **Jon Arryn**

As much as Ned loved his father, he hadn't known Rickard Stark well. Jon Arryn has always been the only true father he has had, and it makes lying to him that much worse. It is against his nature to lie to anyone, but lying to Jon, to the man he named his sister's child in honor of, is downright unfathomable.

 _"Tell me what to do,"_ Ned wants to ask, feeling as lost as he had as a boy when he first arrived in the Vale.

Instead he asks after Lysa and the baby.

5\. **Jon Snow**

"Please, Father, tell me her name," Jon pleads when he is three-and-ten, looking at him with Lyanna's eyes, with Lyanna's expression. He is Lya's boy, there is no denying that, but Jon is _his_ boy too; the boy could keep the secret, there isn't so much danger now. He would be able to understand, to accept it.

But to tell Jon now would mean Jon might hold it against him, and though Rhaegar Targaryen fathered him, Ned loves Jon as fiercely as he loves his five true children and does not want them challenged.

"Some day, Jon, I promise."

Just a little more time. That's all Ned wants.

6\. **Benjen Stark**

He barely knows Benjen. His younger brother was hardly more than a baby when Ned was sent to be fostered at the Eyrie, and Benjen was always so inseparable from Lyanna. Lya was his voice, his courage, his constant companion the same way Robert had been his; perhaps that is why he says it, why he stands before Lyanna's likeness in the crypt and cannot bring himself to lie to his brother.

Ned expects Benjen to be afraid the same as he is, to ask what they will do if Robert and his men ride north to do to Lyanna's son what they did to Elia's, but instead Benjen smiles, touching the cool rock of Lyanna's tomb.

"So we haven't fully lost her after all."

It is that realization more than any other that allows Ned to stop mourning.


End file.
